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Their country is more divided now than it's ever been it's not often you get a race with two odds on runners and  no matter the outcome with both runners declaring victory it should be fun to watch , maybe that's why Trump was so keen to install that new woman judge into the supreme court .

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The Trump audit part I: domestic
President Trump has had real achievements and a baleful effect

Three judges, a tax cut, an ever-more-divided nation and an undrained swamp

BriefingOct 29th 2020 edition

Oct 29th 2020

WASHINGTON, DC

 

https://www.economist.com/briefing/2020/10/29/president-trump-has-had-real-achievements-and-a-baleful-effect

 

America hardly feels great again. There are 11m fewer people working than in February. Barely more than one-third of pupils are attending school normally. Hunger and poverty have risen; the memories of a turbulent summer of protests and racial unrest are still raw. Official figures show 227,000 people dead due to covid-19; excess-mortality data suggest the true total is over 300,000. And both caseloads and hospitalisations are surging for a third time. On October 23rd America recorded nearly 84,000 new cases, the highest daily tally so far.

The mismanaged epidemic, more than anything else, seems likely to cost President Donald Trump his job. As The Economist went to press our election model gave him less than a 5% chance of winning.

 

Were it not for the epidemic, though, Mr Trump might be on the brink of re-election. In 2016 he told voters he would keep the economy growing; until the epidemic hit it had done just that. Growth never quite reached the lustrous annual rate of 4% he promised, but it did do better than many had forecast, and his tax cut in 2017 turned out to be a well-timed fiscal stimulus. At the end of last year unemployment was at its lowest level for half a century. The wages of the less well paid were rising swiftly.

 

What was more, he had made good on other parts of his agenda. Trade deals he disliked had been abandoned or rewritten, tariffs had been slapped on countries accused of stealing jobs and immigration had fallen dramatically. He had appointed two conservative justices to the Supreme Court, a number which he has now brought up to three. “Promises made, promises kept” is one of the slogans of Mr Trump’s re-election campaign. The president tells outright lies with remarkable frequency. But in this he is stretching the truth no further than any politician might.

 

If Mr Trump does indeed lose the election, it seems likely that his main legacies will be the further polarisation of America’s politics, a guide to how the country’s democratic norms can be subverted and serious damage to its reputation overseas (see article). But the past four years have also seen achievements beyond that sad litany. Some of them are distinctive, not all are bad and some may prove long-lived.

 

Give the public a song and dance

In 2016 Mr Trump distinguished himself not just in how he talked but also in what he said. Like all Republicans since Ronald Reagan he was in favour of tax cuts, deregulation, conservative judges, safer streets, stronger armed forces and lower government debt; he was against Obamacare and open borders.

But on many issues he stood out as unorthodox, extreme or both—and in so doing captured voters’ imaginations in a way that his rivals did not. He pledged to deport all 11m undocumented immigrants in the country and build a wall on the border with Mexico. He derided the party’s foreign-policy and free-trade orthodoxies as failures, and held that trade deficits were purely a sign of weakness and poor negotiating—which, as the master of the deal, he could set right. He bashed Wall Street and was against making Social Security and Medicare, the pension and health-insurance programmes for the elderly, less generous. He mocked and disparaged not just his opponents, but also revered Republicans such as the late Senator John McCain (a “loser”).

Given that disparagement it is ironic, if not surprising, that many of his achievements have been those of a generic Republican. His tax cuts, indeed, look modest measured against those of other first-term Republican presidents. According to the Tax Foundation, a think-tank, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 reduces the government’s annual revenue by $150bn, or 0.7% of current gdp, over ten years. They were thus smaller than the tax cuts made under George W. Bush in 2001 (about 1.5% of gdp) or under Reagan in 1981 (2.6%). Mr Trump’s cuts included some welcome reforms, such as a curb on the deduction for mortgage interest and state and local taxes, but no deep rewriting of the tax code.

 

Mr Trump’s judicial appointments, too, were those that any other Republican might have made, given the chance. That he got that chance was thanks to Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, who held up the confirmation of a number of Barack Obama’s judicial nominations—most notably that of Merrick Garland for the Supreme Court in March 2016. The resultant backlog allowed Mr Trump to follow the recommendations of the Federalist Society, a fraternity of conservative jurists, in appointing about 30% of the federal judiciary. Sandra Day O’Connor, Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy—the three justices whom it took Reagan two terms to put on the bench—shaped the court’s rulings for decades. It is likely that Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett will do so too.

 

When it comes to deregulation Mr Trump can credibly claim to have outdone all predecessors. He pledged to eliminate two old regulations for every new one. He now boasts that the ratio he has actually achieved is 22 to one. The list of those scrapped is inflated with some pretty small fry; rules on Uruguayan mutton, Japanese persimmons and the like. But it is undoubtedly true that the pace of new regulation has slowed dramatically. Since Mr Trump’s inauguration, the estimated number of federal rules has grown very slightly, by 0.5%. That is one-twelfth the pace of growth during the Obama and Bush years.

 

In some areas losing rules was beneficial; in few was it fundamental. In finance, for example, though some rules were streamlined, Dodd-Frank, the sweeping law passed after the Great Recession to rein in banks, was not thrown out (although the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a watchdog agency set up by Elizabeth Warren, was effectively neutered). The exception was environmental regulation, which has been thoroughly savaged.

Of the 225 major executive actions in a studiously catalogued list of the Trump administration’s deregulations 70—a clear plurality—are environmental rollbacks. These are rules that will increase the amount of lung-damaging fine-particulate matter belched by coal-fired power plants, methane leaked by oil and gas wells and carbon dioxide emitted from the exhaust pipes of cars with new, less ambitious fuel-economy standards. When the White House claims to have saved $51bn—0.25% of gdp—in regulatory costs it ignores all such debits on the other side of the ledger.

 

On the signature issues which set the Trump campaign apart from the Republican establishment, the successes look more vulnerable to revocation. Take immigration. Xenophobia was the raison d’être for his campaign in 2016, which he launched with a speech warning that Mexico was sending rapists and drug-dealers across the border; later on, Mr Trump called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States”. His administration’s aggressive restriction of migration was therefore no surprise, even if the shock of seeing children alone in detention camps because of a policy of family separation caused an outcry

 

What is perhaps less appreciated is the degree to which it has succeeded. The “Muslim ban” issued in the first days of his presidency ran afoul of the courts and had to be reworked; the border wall Mr Trump promised has not been built, let alone paid for by Mexico. But eligibility criteria for asylum have been tightened, and asylum-seekers at the border must now wait in Mexico while decisions are made. “It may not be the physical wall that Trump initially touted, but there is now a bureaucratic wall that expels every unauthorised immigrant on the southern border,” says Sarah Pierce, an analyst at the Migration Policy Institute. In its revised form the Muslim ban remains in place, with little dissent.

Apprehensions at the border with Mexico have risen to their highest level in 12 years (see chart 1), and in 2019 there were 360,000 deportations. That was not a record—there were 432,000 in 2013—but it was more than there were in 2016, and the share of the deported who had no criminal records, 14% in 2016, had risen to 36%. The administration also increased the bureaucratic hurdles faced by those trying to immigrate legally. Applications for temporary visas and permanent-residency permits have both declined by 17% since 2016. The annual ceiling of refugee admissions has been slashed. The White House recently proposed just 15,000 admissions for 2021, compared with 85,000 admitted in 2016.

 

A pile of debris

In the trade arena Mr Trump renegotiated nafta, abandoned the nascent Trans-Pacific Partnership, imposed tariffs on aluminium and steel and launched a trade war with China. By his own standards, the benefits were sparse. Though the bilateral trade deficit with China has fallen, America’s trade deficit with the rest of the world was steadily increasing even before covid-19 sent it through the roof. Tariffs have helped some targeted industries, but at great cost. American consumers are reckoned to have paid $900,000 for every steel-industry job saved. Manufacturing employment seemed to slump after tariffs with China went into effect in 2018, though Mr Trump’s advisers insist that in the long term the policy will reverse that.

 

Other promises went unkept, most obviously and predictably the pledge on the debt. Rather than putting America on the path to eliminating its national debt in eight years, as he said he would, Mr Trump saw the budget deficit steadily increase over the first three years of his administration. The rise was not as marked as those seen in the first terms of Reagan and George W. Bush, but the starting point was higher. After covid-19 hit the deficit jumped far further; America’s debt is set to exceed its gdp.

Nor was Obamacare repealed and replaced. Mr Trump has been promising to publish a serious health-care plan imminently for his entire tenure, during which the share of Americans without health insurance rose from 8.6% in 2016 to 9.2% in 2019. He eventually laid out something of a second-term health-care agenda on September 24th, when he declared in an executive order that under an “America-first” plan it will “continue to be the policy of the United States…to ensure that Americans with pre-existing conditions can obtain the insurance of their choice”. If a lawsuit against Obamacare that the Supreme Court will hear on November 10th goes the way the plaintiffs want, though, that coverage guarantee will disappear—and that is the side Mr Trump’s Department of Justice is taking in the case.

Mr Trump also wooed voters with a promise to “restore law and order” to cities that he portrayed in his inaugural address as crippled by “American carnage”. Crime in American cities was actually at a low ebb at the time. But after the tumult of a long summer of protests over racial injustice, some of them violent, they hardly seem safer. Preliminary estimates from the fbi suggest that 2020 will see a 15% increase in the murder rate nationwide. Mr Trump’s most notable legislative achievement in this area was signing the First Step Act, which seeks to reduce incarceration and reform prisons; it was a priority of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

And the swamp was not drained. Instead it spread to previously dry land as institutional watchdogs and ethical norms were swept away and new species moved into the murk. It was in these fetid waters that the administration pursued what Steve Bannon, a former senior counsellor to the president, called the “deconstruction of the administrative state”. A weakened and destabilised state apparatus, in which independent inspectors-general are removed or sidelined, the civil service is less independent and personal loyalty paramount is just the sort of government that Mr Trump wants.

How much of that which Mr Trump has done will outlast him should he lose office? The judges and the change in the tone of politics seem the strongest candidates. Beyond his slim legislative record much of what he has done has been accomplished through executive order and changes to regulation which could, in principle, be straightforwardly reversed.

On immigration, for example, the Muslim ban, family separation and the reduced refugee ceiling would be revoked at the very beginning of a Joe Biden administration. But the fact that things can be reversed does not mean that everything will be. It is hard to imagine the Democratic president completely unwinding the new asylum rules on the south-west border, which would undoubtedly invite a new surge of migrants. And there will be other scarring. Prospective immigrants may look elsewhere to study or start businesses even if the country seems welcoming again.

There would be a more thorough attempt to undo loosened environmental protections. But this could be complicated by Mr Trump’s judicial legacy—the courts he leaves behind will probably take a cagier attitude to constraints on business. And as with immigration, there will be scarring that is not easily reversed. People whose lungs were damaged by fine particles will not be cured spontaneously. According to calculations by the Rhodium Group, a research outfit, greenhouse gases equivalent to 1.8bn tonnes of carbon dioxide will be emitted over the coming 15 years solely because of Mr Trump’s deregulations.

When it comes to the body politic, the scars run deep. The bitterly divided country of the 2016 campaign is more bitterly divided than ever. Voters tell pollsters they see the stakes in this election as greater than those in any before (see chart 3). A remarkable 73% of Americans say Republicans and Democrats cannot agree on basic facts. There is a detectible rise in new strains of extreme partisanship. Data from the Voter Study Group, a research outfit, show one in five Americans saying that violence could be justified if the other party wins the impending election—a minority, but one that has increased markedly since 2017. Surveys by Lilliana Mason and Nathan Kalmoe, two political scientists, reveal disturbing levels of antipathy for fellow Americans: 60% of voters think members of the other party constitute a threat to America, more than 40% would call them evil, and 20% think they are animals (see chart 4).

This trend towards the hyper-partisan predated Mr Trump and went a long way towards explaining his election. He in turn has amplified it—both “a product and an accelerant of the partisan doom loop” in the words of Lee Drutman, a political scientist. In 2016 party affiliation had already come to dominate where Americans live, where they got their news and even whom they married. But to carry that tendency through to what would seem to be basic public-health measures—80% of Biden supporters say they have always worn masks in the previous week compared with just 43% of Trump supporters—took a gift for division unlike any before.

 

Mr Trump’s decision to rule as the leader of a faction, rather than the whole nation, has been supported by the Republican Party’s base and much of its elected elite. The unconvinced have mostly kept silent on the matter. This has allowed him to trample the norms of politics and good government in any number of ways, from a culpable lack of response to the devastation wrought on Puerto Rico by Hurricane Maria to describing protests against neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia, as having “very fine people on both sides” to seeing people tear-gassed to enable a photo opportunity. The most pertinent of these outrages at the moment are his attempts to delegitimise the election result. Almost 40% of Republican voters say they do not think the upcoming election will be fair; half of Democrats are worried that there will not be a peaceful transition if Mr Biden wins.

 

If Mr Trump were to keep his address on Pennsylvania Avenue, what then? There is no real programme for four more years of a Trump presidency. The Republican Party chose to eschew a party platform this year; in its place the campaign released a bombastic list of bullet-pointed aspirations such as “Drain the Globalist Swamp by Taking on International Organisations That Hurt American Citizens”. Without a majority in the House, Mr Trump would be able to pass little if any significant legislation. But the administrative and regulatory changes brought about in the past four years would be taken further, as would the erosion of standards in public life. And the divisions he both embodies and exacerbates would become yet more destructive. 

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The Trump audit part II: foreign policy
President Trump’s criticisms of the world order had some merit

But he has left it in worse shape than he found it

BriefingOct 29th 2020 edition

Oct 29th 2020

 

https://www.economist.com/briefing/2020/10/29/president-trumps-criticisms-of-the-world-order-had-some-merit

 

Foreign affairs played an important, and murky, role in Donald Trump’s presidency from before it even began. Russia’s meddling in the election that brought his unexpected victory, and Mr Trump’s happiness in snubbing the findings of his own intelligence services on the subject, set an invidious context for all that followed. His later attempt to inveigle political favours from Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, led to his becoming the first president ever to be impeached over his conduct of foreign policy. Only Republican support in the Senate saved him from losing office.

Such things do not go unnoticed. America’s reputation abroad has plunged during Mr Trump’s presidency. Around the world, judging by a 13-country survey published in September by Pew Research Centre, the share of people with a favourable view of America is in many cases at its lowest since Pew began such polling nearly two decades ago (see chart 5). In Britain America’s approval rating has dropped from 61% in 2016 to 41%; in Japan it has fallen from 72% to 41%.

Confidence in Mr Trump to do the right thing in world affairs is even lower, especially in Europe: a dismal 11% in France and 10% in Germany, compared with a score of 84% and 86%, respectively, for Barack Obama in 2016. European foreign-policy types do not mince their words. “Calamitous, cataclysmic, catastrophic, pathetic,” says François Heisbourg of the Foundation for Strategic Research, a French think-tank, when asked to describe how history will judge Mr Trump’s foreign policy. At home many Republican foreign-policy experts hold similar views; dozens are supporting his Democratic challenger, Joe Biden.

 

Some who have observed from ringside as Mr Trump has been swayed by flattery and greed feel that to dignify his foreign policy with any sort of conventional analysis is to grant it strategic and ideological heft that it lacks. On this view Mr Trump’s big decisions have been driven by narcissism and a desire for personal gain: Trump First, not America First. But those who stick by him give a different account.

These supporters are consequentialists. They argue that the detractors give too much weight to Mr Trump’s unseemly taunts and tweets; a focus on his actions and their likely results, some not yet felt, will tell a different story, one which will become clearer and look wiser as time goes by but which critics are currently blind to.

As Matt Pottinger, deputy national security adviser, puts it, “a lot is written about the sacred cows Mr Trump has gored, but less about the rabbits he’s pulled out of the hat.” Nadia Schadlow of the Hudson Institute, who served as deputy national security adviser for strategy in 2018, argues in Foreign Affairs that since the end of the cold war American policymakers have been “beguiled by a set of illusions about the world order”; Mr Trump’s “series of long-overdue corrections” has shattered those illusions.

 

To assess that claim one must first note the degree to which Mr Trump’s course is, in fact, a continuation of that on which the country was already set. The increased preoccupation with Asia (to which Mr Obama “pivoted”); the recognition that America needed to pay more attention to its domestic troubles (“nation-building here at home”, as Mr Obama called it); the weariness with “forever wars”: in all these areas Mr Trump has been following a public mood which has been shaping America’s foreign policy for years.

Despite his alarming bluster Mr Trump has not so far turned out to be a bellicose president. In Afghanistan he is winding down the longest war in American history (if not as fast as he promised to). In the Middle East he continued the fight against Islamic State, hunting down its self-proclaimed caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, but he started no new wars. In 2019 he caused some consternation among hawks in his administration when he drew back from a counter-attack against Iran after it downed an American drone.

 

He makes an exception for trade wars; they provide a form of combat, brash and performative, which he positively relishes. His campaign against China is the most heavyweight fight—one in which he claimed victory with the “phase one” trade deal reached in January. But he was also happy to enter into hostilities with America’s North American neighbours, achieving what one observer called “the rare diplomatic feat of pissing off the Canadians” in order to renegotiate the trade deal that binds the two countries and Mexico. In his attempts to protect America’s steel industry he went as far as to call the European Union—composed almost entirely of nato allies—a “foe” on trade.

 

It has not been his only beef with Europe. Presidents from John F. Kennedy onwards have complained about America’s nato allies failing to carry a fair share of the burden of defending themselves. Mr Trump has done so with particular force—and to significant effect. It is one of the more salutary of the shocks he has administered to the basic assumptions of foreign-policy wonks around the world.

 

The fancy and the plush

The “rules-based world order” beloved of those professionals (and this newspaper) was hardly in good shape when Mr Trump came to power. Rivalry with Russia and China had already rendered the un Security Council largely dysfunctional. Mr Obama had undermined America’s credibility as an ultimate enforcer when he declared that the use of chemical weapons by Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, would constitute a “red line” and then administered no retribution when it was crossed.

Mr Trump has undercut that creaky established order in large part by giving new voice to an old strand in American thinking: a belief that America should act beyond its borders only in furtherance of specific short-term interests. From its first decades as superpower until a few years ago America sought to be a power not just in the world, but for the world. It would frequently restrain itself in deference to rules and the concerns of allies. In Mr Trump’s assessment, though, America comes first, might is right, and saying so is fun.

Mr Trump’s brashness has not had all the dire consequences that critics predicted. Witness North Korea. When handing over power Mr Obama is said to have told him that the country’s nuclear weapons would be his most urgent problem. Mr Trump instinctively addressed it with great-man theatre, meeting and corresponding with Kim Jong Un in what he described as a “love affair”. It was an unusual approach, and one many of his advisers disliked. But the usual approaches had yielded nothing. Nicholas Burns of Harvard University, a former nato ambassador who now advises Mr Biden and gives the president a “failing grade” on foreign policy overall, nevertheless reckons Mr Trump was right to meet Mr Kim. It is true that Mr Kim gained recognition as a peer summiteer while carrying on with his nuclear programme. But there has been no subsequent crisis, and the de facto recognition of North Korea’s nuclear status has put to rest previous talk of pre-emptive military counter-proliferation strikes.

 

Mr Trump’s bullying of nato allies has certainly concentrated minds. He claims credit for their increased defence spending, which in 2020 is expected to be 19% higher than it was in 2016, a cumulative extra spend over four years of $130bn (see chart 6). But by failing to express unequivocal support for the mutual-defence guarantee at nato’s heart he caused real damage, even as his administration increased its defence spending in Europe, deployed forces in front-line states and took part in some of the biggest exercises since the end of the cold war.

In the Middle East Mr Trump can claim bragging rights for the Abraham accords, a peace agreement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates since joined by Bahrain and, after some American arm-twisting, Sudan. He pleased the Israeli government and many American supporters by moving America’s embassy to Jerusalem. But he has shown no interest in using his influence to press the Saudis to end their brutal war in Yemen—instead, he vetoed a bill that would have helped do so. Rather than punishing Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Muhammad bin Salman, for his suspected role in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist critical of the Saudi regime, Mr Trump protected him. “I saved his ass”, he boasted to Bob Woodward, a veteran reporter, who duly recorded the claim in his book “Rage”.

 

Mr Trump’s decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal—a move widely supported within his party—has put America at loggerheads with its allies and eased Iran’s route to becoming a nuclear power. The policy of “maximum pressure” on Iran, lacking any achievable aims, has little to show for itself save the deterrent effect of the uncharacteristically bold action which saw the country’s top general, Qassem Suleimani, killed by a drone. It is a similar story with maximum pressure on Venezuela. That country’s dictator, Nicolás Maduro, remains firmly in place, as does the communist regime of his Cuban backers.

 

The area where Mr Trump has shaken things up most is in relations with China, the single biggest issue in American foreign policy. Such a rattling may have been coming anyway because of China’s growing aggression. But Trumpists believe the president’s new realism marked a decisive break with the Democrats’ tendency to favour process over outcomes.

According to this narrative, Americans naively thought that opening up to China and letting it join the wto in 2001 would in time encourage it to become more liberal and democratic. The opposite has happened. China exploited the West’s openness in order to steal its intellectual property. Under its increasingly authoritarian president, Xi Jinping, it has become a fiercer economic rival, as well as a more powerful one. It has continued to build up its armed forces and to bully its neighbours. It was left to Mr Trump to challenge the idea that this was unstoppable.

Allegiance is ruled by expedience

Toughness towards China has become a rare area of bipartisan consensus in America. The administration has started to shift attitudes elsewhere, too. It successfully urged Britain to shun Huawei, a Chinese telecoms giant, for its 5g telecoms network. More allies are expected to fall into line. Mr Pottinger says that Europe is “18-24 months behind us, but moving at the same speed and direction”. In Asia, America’s embrace of the phrase “a free and open Indo-Pacific”, expressing resistance to Chinese hegemony, has found favour from India to Indonesia, much to China’s annoyance.

 

There is, though, no evidence that Mr Trump has plans to build any new structure on the ground he has opened up. And he has deprived himself of the tools whereby he might do so. America’s foreign service, skilled in the patient work of erecting institutions and nurturing relationships, has been gutted; functionaries still in place know that anything that they, or indeed the president, have negotiated could be undone at any time in just 280 characters.

 

The damage wrought by the president’s wrecking ball has mounted up in three particular areas. The first is institutional. For more than half a century the world has run on the basis of a system established amid the ruins of the second world war, led by America. Now that system’s chief architect is undermining it. In some cases—nato, the wto, the un itself—Mr Trump has merely weakened the foundations. In others he has turned tail. His rejection of arms control goes beyond renouncing the Iran deal. When Russia broke the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty he scrapped the treaty completely. He flirted with allowing New start, America’s one remaining nuclear treaty with Russia, to expire early next year, though now seems to want a last-ditch deal to save it.

 

Mr Trump’s response to covid-19 has shown this approach at its worst. In the midst of a global pandemic he chose to attack and abandon the World Health Organisation, the body responsible for tackling such crises. Where the world would normally expect America to take a lead, or at least to try to, it found an administration more interested in blaming others and shunning global efforts. Something similar goes for the greater crisis beyond covid, that of climate change: a repudiation of international efforts and wilful negligence at home. Every such American retreat from the international system is seen in Beijing as a chance to advance China’s claims.

 

The second area of damage is Mr Trump’s sidelining of his allies, who have frequently had no prior warning of major developments such as America’s abandoning of the Kurds in Syria or its reduction of forces in Germany. America’s alliances can act as a force-multiplier, turning its quarter or so of world gdp into a coalition accounting for some 60% of the world economy, far harder for China or Russia (neither of which has a network of permanent allies) to resist. Yet Mr Trump has taken allies for granted and belittled their leaders while flattering Presidents Putin and Xi. Foreign-policy get-togethers are awash with worries over “Westlessness”.

 

Encouraged by his inattention, Turkey, under the authoritarian leadership of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is in the process of unbundling itself from the West. “The Americans have gone awol and the Turks have run amok,” says Mr Heisbourg. In Asia, where, as in Europe, Mr Trump has treated mutually advantageous defence relationships like protection rackets, America remains the most powerful country, according to an “Asia Power Index” compiled by the Lowy Institute, an Australian think-tank. But its lead over China has narrowed by half since 2018. Despite having raised the stakes with China, Mr Trump has shown little sense that he knows how to play the subsequent game, or to rally allies to his side.

 

Allied misgivings about America reflect the third big casualty of Mr Trump’s wrecking ball: the country’s power of example. For much of post-1945 history many have looked to America as a beacon—often flawed, to be sure, but nevertheless a champion of democracy and human rights, and the best hope for the aspirations expressed in its constitution. Now the world sees the workings of America’s own democracy called into question under a president who stokes racial divisions and slams the door on those yearning to breathe free.

Corruption at home makes it harder for American officials to be taken seriously when they preach about kleptocracy. As for human rights Mr Trump has maintained a public silence on abuses from Belarus to Hong Kong. In private, according to John Bolton, his fourth national security adviser, he told Mr Xi that building detention camps for Uyghurs in Xinjiang was “the right thing to do”. An America which can only claim to be stronger than China, not better, is one that has weakened itself.

 

Try to stay serene and calm

 

How permanent is the damage? Some things can be put back together quickly if, as seems likely, Mr Biden wins the election. America would rejoin the Paris agreement on climate change right away. America’s favourability ratings around the world might bounce back, as they did when Mr Obama replaced George W. Bush in the White House. But the fact that America can elect rogue presidents won’t be forgotten. The late Samuel Huntington, a political scientist, suggested that two changes of power were needed before a democracy could be considered firmly entrenched. Perhaps two changes of president will be needed to reassure the world about America.

Mr Trump may have confronted a rising China and created the conditions both for some coalition-building in Asia and for Europe to get serious about its own defence. But the destruction along the way has been enormous. The repair job cannot begin soon enough.■

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Battle-hymn of the Never Trumpers

Renegade Republicans represent the breadth—and the admirable best—of Joe Biden’s coalition

The irony of the election that unleashed Donald Trump upon America was how normal it was. Contrary to early reports, he was not elevated to the presidency by hordes of aggrieved non-voters and Democrats. He won a similar (if slightly smaller) share of the vote to Mitt Romney in 2012 from much the same Republican voters. The election was decided more by Hillary Clinton’s failure to turn out Democrats in a few midwestern states than by Mr Trump’s success in recruiting them. He won fewer votes in Wisconsin—the state that sealed his victory—than Mr Romney.

This time looks to be different. Joe Biden’s promise to restore normality to the government has found support from an unusually broad swathe of voters. If the polls are right, he is on course to win the biggest share of the vote since Ronald Reagan in 1984. Besides Democrats of all hues, he appears to have the backing of most independent voters (millions of whom plumped for a third-party candidate in 2016) and around 10% of self-described Republicans. Kamala Harris was right to boast in the vice-presidential debate of Mr Biden having assembled “one of the broadest coalitions of folks that you’ve ever seen in a presidential race”.

Notwithstanding the main explanation for this coalescence—the country’s overriding desire to sack Mr Trump—it is dramatic and unpredicted. The Biden coalition stretches from Bernie Sanders and the hard-left to “Never Trump” Republicans, including politicians such as John Kasich and Carly Fiorina and operatives such as George Conway and Bill Kristol. Of all these diverse parts, the role of the Never Trumpers has been most remarkable of all.

Not since Lyndon Johnson crushed Barry Goldwater in 1964 have so many leading lights in one party backed the nominee of the other. And Goldwater was a reviled challenger. By setting themselves against the sitting president of their own party—at a time of more intense polarisation—the Never Trumpers have made themselves heretics on the right while taking on the mantle of truth-tellers, authenticated by a willingness to commit career suicide, to almost everyone else.

This has transformed their reputations. Mr Kristol, formerly known on the left as the warmongering editor of the Weekly Standard, now gets practically mobbed on liberal campuses. Mr Conway, a lawyer and proud former member of the “vast right-wing conspiracy” to bring down Bill Clinton, has become a liberal social-media star. It helps, of course, that the Never Trumpers’ denunciations of Mr Trump and his Republican enablers tend to chime with long-standing Democratic criticisms. Only, given their superior knowledge of the subject-matter, they invariably improve upon them. A current example is “It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party became Donald Trump”, in which Mr Romney’s former chief strategist, Stuart Stevens, analyses the degree to which the party he served for 30 years is fuelled by racism.

More happily, Never Trumpers, freed of the partisan yoke, have provided most of the laughs in this grim campaign. The irreverent Lincoln Project (in which Messrs Conway and Stevens are involved) is chiefly dedicated to provoking the president to Twitter rage. With a nod to Michelle Obama, its pledge to Democrats is: “We go low so you don’t have to.” In their podcasts and articles—including in the Bulwark, a Never Trump news site—Mike Murphy and Tim Miller of Republican Voters Against Trump (rvat) have shown themselves to be two of the wittiest people in politics. This has addressed such a conspicuous cultural problem—the fact that American satire is dominated by lefties—that there is talk of the Lincoln Project being repurposed as an entertainment company.

rvat has focused on the grittier business of moving votes to Mr Biden. Its founder, Sarah Longwell, perhaps the Never Trumper-in-chief, began that task during the Democratic primaries. The group’s signature ad—featuring an angry or sorrowful anti-Trump testimony from an ordinary Republican voter—may be the most memorable of 2020. Having raised $40m, rvat has blitzed hundreds of such testimonies across the battlegrounds. According to Mr Murphy, who heads the group’s Florida operation (codenamed Orange Crush), its ads have influenced the Biden campaign’s there.

As the election looms, Democrats are having a hushed debate about how long their discipline might outlive a Biden victory. An equally intriguing question concerns the Never Trumpers. Only a couple would find jobs in a Biden administration. They are not trusted by Democratic decision-makers. And there is no way back to the Republican Party, where they are hated, for most. Yet some parts of their operations, including the Bulwark, will remain. And their record of raising millions of dollars for a centrist cause could open up a role operating between the two parties (perhaps within the political constellation of Mike Bloomberg, an rvat donor).

Their post-partisan insights would make this as desirable as their manifest capabilities. For example, even Never Trumpers who are less critical of their old party than Mr Stevens have a heightened understanding of its flaws. Mr Kristol claims to have shifted little in his politics—except in developing a new appreciation of the threats African-Americans face to their lives and suffrage. Perhaps he might orchestrate a bipartisan drive to reform the country’s chaotic and sometimes exclusionary election laws.

Never again

Whatever their future holds, the Never Trumpers have played an admirable part. Most followed their consciences into opposition at significant risk to their livelihoods. The predictable Republican slur, that they are in it for the money, is false. If they are now enjoying success, it is because their consciences turned out to be a better predictor of America’s response to Mr Trump than their cynical former colleagues anticipated. John McCain liked to talk about the importance of backing country over party. Never Trumpers have provided an even more resounding demonstration of this than the late senator. They deserve their brief celebrity and more.

 

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I predict Kamala Harris will be President by 2022 and the Republicans will then win the following election, when she takes the country deeper down the divisive identity politics road.

 

I just wish the UK could disentangle itself more from goings on in the US.

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2 hours ago, Gonzo79 said:

I predict Kamala Harris will be President by 2022 and the Republicans will then win the following election, when she takes the country deeper down the divisive identity politics road.

 

I just wish the UK could disentangle itself more from goings on in the US.

It isn't about the UK entangling itself in US affairs. In fact it has nothing to do with the actions of nation states, any more that the impeachment attempt against Trump had anything to do with Russia. What we are witnessing is a globally-orchestrated disruption of the established order, using any means available to ferment division and discontent. In some instances it's nationalism, often it's religion, usually Islamism. More often it's pseudo socialism and the cult of feelings and fairness. Every western leader or potential leader is portrayed as divisive, some are. But what you want to be pursuing disentanglement from are the puppeteers who have been steadily undermining unity and social cohesion for the last several decades. I mean, when you think about the educational and economic strength of the United States, how is it possible that only crooks and weirdo's ever get put forward for the Presidency. Who actually benefits from that?

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35 minutes ago, Bill said:

It isn't about the UK entangling itself in US affairs. In fact it has nothing to do with the actions of nation states

 

35 minutes ago, Bill said:

But what you want to be pursuing disentanglement from are the puppeteers who have been steadily undermining unity and social cohesion for the last several decades.

In my opinion, most of the puppeteering practices originate in the US.

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3 minutes ago, Gonzo79 said:

 

In my opinion, most of the puppeteering practices originate in the US.

From what we've seen since Trump got elected, that wouldn't surprise me at all. After all, Biden certainly didn't become a Presidential candidate through his own efforts or by virtue of any positive characteristics. I swear you can see his strings

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